Cordula
by Obsidian Blade
Summary: The search for a missing guard patrol leads a Gilnean policewoman into the Blackwald, where her complacency as the muscle of the establishment is not so well tolerated.
1. Beginning

They put her on the night shift as a punishment, and after the second week Cordula was in love. It was the dark that did it. Only the shadows moved on the daytime beat, but when shadow had full reign it made the whole world shift along with it.

She strolled through the centre of Stormglen at just after suppertime with the air balmy and the light dying slow. The lamplighter walked right alongside, chatty-like, her long pole with the wick on the end lifting up to the lamps 'til the streets were awash with flickering orange and the blackness were dancing between the cobbles.

Daytime were near dead by the time she left the lamplighter at the outskirts. The sun hit the sea as she headed west: the water turned to precious metal, the path underfoot baked red, and one last gout of light lent flame to the trees. For a half-minute the Blackwald seemed to burn, before the stars opened up overhead, and the darkness set in.

There were villains down there, she knew for a fact, where the trees twisted and roiled by the leave of the shadow. Human, mind, which made them that bit more worrying, because who were strong enough, mad enough, to brave the woods intentionally?

It made her glad for the sword and shield at her back, the gun at her hip, and her partner up ahead, leaning against one of the dead lampposts as he lit a cig between cupped palms. The nip of flame cast his young, broad face a more sinister bent, though his blue eyes were lamb-docile when he looked at her, and his big mouth made a full smile.

'Aight?'

'Aight.'

He weren't one for chatter, which bothered Cordie not a jot. Together they trudged up the slope, with the cliffs rising flat and unfamiliar ahead and the forest sinking lower to the side. Past more broken lamps they went, past the bog lying still and glassy, and up the slope toward the bridge, where their own human-made structure had gone rogue in the moonlight, as gothic as a print in a storybook, the gables stretched long like knives sheathed in slate.

They sat there for a while on the bridge, out at the middle, legs dangling and cig ends glowing. Gilneas wore her moonbeam silver only in patches tonight, as wraiths of cloud blew by at top lick, casting their likeness in ink on the rooftops for what little time they lingered. And after those hours when the other guards didn't show, and Cordie grew wary, the mists began to lift from the bog, and soon all beneath them was hidden and pale.

'Well,' said her partner. 'Seems obvious they're not coming. Should head back, most likely.'

'Or on.' Cordie looked ahead to the beat that weren't theirs. 'Though it int a trail I ever got to learning.'

He stubbed out his cig underfoot. 'Hell with it. We int yet learned? Then let's get started.'


	2. Accusation

The ground was steep past the bridge, steeper than either of them had expected, and wet from the dewfall. He slipped a few times, trying to forge ahead, trying to lead, his pistol drawn early, while she planted her feet carefully, doubting, now, the shadows that entranced her, subjecting them to every inquiry her eyes and ears could make.

It was a narrow path for a thoroughfare, this one, with the rising cliffs on one side and the falling cliffs on the other. There wasn't much space for anything to hide, unless it sprang down from the rocks – and her head turned up at that thought, and she eyed the jagged ridge, jet black with the moon behind it. Nothing.

Still nothing as the slope began to level out and the gatehouse into Gilneas loomed, with its lamps left unbroken and its walls good and strong. The other patrol didn't head into the city, she knew that much, and there was only one other way to go: along the path as it doubled back on itself, following the very base of the cliffs on toward Duskhaven. Alongside the bog, as it happened, and well into the thick of the mist.

'It's an advantage,' he told her. 'We'll be hidden good and proper.'

'Oh aye? Next to no sight, that's useful for us, is it, when we's doing the searching?'

'You yellowing out, Ula?'

'I's setting you straight, Dag. Now you stay bloody close and all.'

She set her shield to her arm and loosened her sword in its sheath, and they pressed on into the murk. It settled a silence right over them, the mist: all sound faded but the padding of their feet and the jingle of their armour, and the occasional splash from the swamp, closer than it were.

The light of a surviving lamp formed a ruddy miasma in the fog up ahead, turning to silhouette something heaped there at the roadside. It gained limbs, armour and a Gilnean tabard as they drew closer, until Dag's foot rolled the body over, and they saw the face of half the missing pair.

He stooped low, hand outstretched. 'Still breathing.'

'Stay with him.'

'Well where're you going?'

She couldn't explain. It was all instinct, the certainty of someone past the light, someone out in the mud. She skirted Dag and jumped the fence, and right away there were a snap and a splash, the sound of cloth whirling, the sound she knew right well as being the start of a fierce retreat.

'Oi! You hold it right there!'

The mist swallowed her voice like the sound of them footsteps, but she raced on anyway, water splashing up her thighs, everything fading to white all around her, until she was running in a little purse of reality, just herself and the mud beneath her boots, and the copper's sense of a crook not far escaped, but escaped nonetheless. She growled.

'What've you done with the other fella? What've you done?'


	3. Restless

The mud sucked at her boots, made her stumble. In all her armour Cordula held no delusions of being quiet at the best of times, but all this splashing and cursing weren't getting her anywhere, just increasing the chance she got sucked under, or that something mortiferous heard and reckoned it could get a solid meal out of her. She circled, lost, direction unfathomable with each patch of ground all dislocated from the next by the wall of white, and finally set her arse down on a mouldering log.

What choice was there? Whoever it was, they were gone. Disappeared just as soundly as Dag and the injured guard, the path, and even the cathedral spire of Gilneas. Now that were right disconcerting. The sight of the city was meant to be a constant.

She took her flask from her hip and sipped mulled wine. Not brilliant, cold. She'd meant to warm it over the gaslight just outside her door, and drink it sitting on her front step as the sun came to rise and Stormglen took to waking all around her. But now she'd be waiting well past that time just for the mist to clear, so bugger suspended pleasures. She drew a mouthful of the spicy stuff and rolled it around her tongue, glowering into the mists.

_If you go where you don't belong, you'll get yourself into trouble._

Her mother had always been insistent on the point, and this was the first time Cordula had to admit there being some truth to it. Of course, usually she got insistent right back that it were the boundary-makers and down-trodders who started it, not her, she were only soul-searching, testing things. Who were they to pen her in? And her mother always side-eyed her at that, stared at her good and long, and changed the subject right away to _you better mind the king._

Which got her wondering now. She'd heard mention of Crowley's lot since the last altercation with Mum, that he'd taken to dissenting and encouraging others to dissent along with him. It were a rumour conveyed by dodgy sorts, mind, so she couldn't be sure of it, but supposing it was true. Might be one of his followers that attacked the other patrol.

There was no denying, after all, that the night watch wore the colours brighter than most anyone else: her fingers followed the lines of the flag on her tabard, picked out extra sharp with thick gilt stitches, so it'd be seen even with nowt but moonlight to go by.

Her eyes went back to pressing against the mist, trying to punch right through and see what waited on the other side. She couldn't much like this train of thought. This were some breed of attack on the government, on the establishment, then that put her right in the line of fire, and Dag too. Dag, who'd no doubt forgotten the way the mist could get at the gunpowder, and who must've got through his copper trials by pure luck, as she'd never once seen him draw his sword without fumbling the thing.

She needed to get back to him, soon as this mist gave her an opening. Soon as she could see further than the tip of her bloody nose.


	4. Snowflake

Water soaked her through as the mist began to dissipate, froze her to the bone. Silhouettes blocked out in uniform shades of grey began to show through the whiteness. Slowly the trees gained their knots and gnarls, and the post not far in front of her gained hair and eyes.

Copper and suspect shared a moment free of any comprehension: both rubbing their arms for warmth, both staring, expecting greenery. Then the hoarfrost over Cordula's brain gave way. She saw his helm over curling brown hair; the feline aspect to his face, cheekbones broad, eyes set wide; a thatch of beard along his jaw; and his standard-issue armour, the crest on the clasp of his cloak scratched away, where tapered gouges met in the middle like a brass snowflake.

Her stone-cold muscles turned her instinctive charge into a stiff-legged stumble. Blundering through ankle-deep water, her teeth chattering so hard she couldn't force open her jaw to yell, she saw reality sink in through the man's eyes, and his flight reflex flare up.

Only he was bloody cold too, and his leap took him directly into the half-sunken remains of an old stage carriage. He sprawled backward over it, a swirl of cloak and legs, and splashed down on the far side.

'Un'er'est!' she forced out as she slogged after him, but he was having none of it. He rolled up and staggered forward, limping like the cold had rendered him a cripple.

'Come off it!' She had her jaw obeying orders now, just about. 'Making a fool of th'both of us!'

Over half-sunken logs and through sucking mud they went, the most ridiculous chase she'd had the poor luck to be a part of, their arms flung wide to make up the balance their knocking knees couldn't manage. The toe of her boot caught on a root; she sprawled forward into the bog, grit sloshing down inside her breastplate. He stumbled onto solid ground; slid on wet grass; ran on up a ridge, the tips of the trees jagged at his back; and leapt.

Down, into the Blackwald.

The mud sucked off her gauntlet as Cordula struggled to right herself. She lurched forward, fell back to her knees, and finally reached solid ground, then the precipice. Her pause was fleeting. Undergrowth choked the ground beneath the trees: there was no calculating her footing, she could only trust in luck and her own dogged balance. Sighting him not far away, hobbling beneath twisted boughs, she leapt.

Her heels snapped saplings and sank into loam. With a grunt she turned her forward topple into a roll and bounded up. Oh, he was slowing, hurt, maybe, while she was only wet, wet and narked that she'd had to do this at all. She saw him duck beneath a hollow mound of roots, and barged on in pursuit, until pain blazed in the back of her skull – once, twice, thrice – and the trees' spider-leg branches spun above her and webbed her up in darkness.


	5. Haze

When she was fifteen, as green as they came, she lived in old soldier barracks as the force trained her up. She did better than most at the running, duelling and plain-and-simple standing about for hours at a time. It was that age when even the shorter girls were mostly taller than the boys, whose growth spurts were only just starting, and Cordula was already nearing six foot. Weed, they called her, as she'd gone up like one, and she took one step to every two of theirs.

It wasn't just the length of her legs that had her succeeding, of course. She worked herself half to death, fell into bed at night mostly clothed. She'd wake for nothing until the bell got to clanging just before dawn, and they had to run a good ten miles before anyone'd give them breakfast.

All proved to be a disadvantage, the hard work and the heavy sleeping, just once. Once, when the bell that'd woken her wasn't the sergeant's but that of a ship, peeling distantly out across Keel Harbour well below them.

She'd thought, in that moment of waking, that she was still sleeping. There was no sense in it, in that bell, or in the cold, wet air blowing against her, or in the jolting of her body, wrapped up in stiff cloth, or the disembodied sniggering that came from all around. They left her on the northernmost tip of the headlands, groggy and confused, and raced back to the horse and cart they'd stolen for transport. She'd lain there in the grass and watched them go, her brain still trying to decode the strange jolting weightlessness of being carried not like a person but a thing.

It was just as disorientating now, or maybe that was down to the blood slipping down her scalp and neck. There was no cloth this time, no huddle of recruits bearing her up. Just a pair of arms looped under hers, and a pair of hands bearing up her ankles.

'We could simply leave her.' A posh man's voice. Strained, though he was down by her feet and couldn't be taking too much of her weight.

'Don't joke.' This voice was rougher, a bit more like hers, but class was always in the vowels, and his were thick on four-course meals and pudding.

'What makes you say I'm joking? I'm not joking, not at all, and if you hadn't hit her so hard-'

'It's straightforward, Averill. She'd have caught you.'

'Well, I don't see how this is any better, frankly.'

'Then I'll take it you've never been in prison.'

'The only prison to trouble me at all is a good deal larger than Stormglen's gaol.'

'Come off it.'

'Which prison?' croaked Cordula.

Averill gave a yelp of surprise and dropped her feet, jumping back. The man behind her tightened his grip on her arms.

'Alright, copper. No need to fight.'

'Aye, mate, so you can set me down and all.'

Averill glared. 'Don't.'


	6. Flame

'What do you expect she'll do, Averill, without weaponry,' asked the man at Cordula's back, before he dipped his head closer to hers. 'We'll need your best behaviour, or the Blackwald will have all three of us.'

She looked past Averill, tense and angry, to the sinewy trees that surrounded them, blotting out all landmarks. Dawn sunlight streaked the sky from behind her, so they were headed east, but that was all she could claim to know.

'I'll be right calm and all,' she told the two men. 'Though don't think I'm happy with the either of you.'

'Understandable. You can go ahead and get your feet under you now.'

Averill's glower intensified at this, and Cordula found amusement in the man's dedication to a pout. Fear hadn't caught up with her yet, not in the slightest. Might be the adrenaline staving it off, or the head injury. She knew better than to discredit the threat posed by these two men, for all Averill's whining and his mate's apparently good nature. Two against one were never good odds, and one of them had her sword, and her shield, and her gun.

'What prison, then?' she asked again as she stood, her head all shaky on the inside, like her brain was the tongue of a bell they'd set to ringing with a stick to the skull.

The man behind her pressed a hand to her shoulder blade to steady her, and she glanced back at him. He about matched her in height, which made him some six foot two or so, lean muscle across arms and shoulders, tapered waist. There was a slight bowing of the legs that had her thinking he might have spent too much time in the saddle. Fox hunting, she hoped, rather than something more military, though the sheer size of him meant he'd be a threat even without his stringy hanger-on.

'What prison?' asked said stringy hanger-on, regarding her with disdain. '_This kingdom_.' And he talked past them both, nose in the air, a proper picture of a noble.

'Don't mind him,' said the bigger bloke, voice pitched conspiratorially low. 'Gets carried away.'

'Nothing wrong with having a bit of fire in him,' said Cordula with a nod. She took note of her spiked shield slung over the man's shoulder as he turned about to follow on. 'Going to give us your name too, get acquainted-like?'

'Bad enough that you know his, I think. Worse that you've seen our faces. Better that I don't add to our stack of mutual misfortunes, I'm sure you'll agree.'

She considered, fleetingly, the sort of force arms like his could put behind that shield, and the way her face would look after.

'Aye, better not. And you needn't worry, mate. I've a poor eye for faces if I'm honest.'

He laughed at that. 'You're a copper, love, which makes your honesty a dubious sort.'

'You and my honesty'll get along right well, then, won't you.'

'Aye. There is that.'


End file.
